


home again, back again, in brooklyn

by swimthewholeriogrande



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Bisexual Male Character, F/M, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, Hospitalization, Hurt Jake Peralta, Hurt/Comfort, Recovery, Slurs, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-10-31 03:29:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17841608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swimthewholeriogrande/pseuds/swimthewholeriogrande
Summary: The world is always telling them that people suck. This time, they are inclined to agree.





	home again, back again, in brooklyn

"Hey!"

Jake speeds up. He hunches his shoulder, hides his face in the collar of his jacket, and wishes suddenly that he hadn't let Rosa drunkenly paint that rainbow on his cheek.

"Hey, slow down!"

Jake's just shy of running now. He's maybe two blocks from home, from their apartment, from Amy waiting up in his sweatpants with her hair in a bun. So close. His phone buzzes in his pocket and he knows without checking that it's her teasing him about being out so late. Almost there, he thinks, but the heavy, stumbling footsteps behind him have caught up. 

"Wait up..."

There's three of them. Jake turns reluctantly to face them, putting on his best pacifying expression and putting his hands in his pockets. The streetlights glint off the damp pavement, their dark eyes. 

"Did you," one of them slurs, "you come out of the gay bar?"

He knows now what this will be, so Jake smiles tightly and takes a step back. "No," he lies. "Must've been someone else. I have to go -"

They're in a loose circle around him now. When Jake turns around to face home, there's someone there, there's somewhere in every direction he turns. 

"I think it was you. I think you're a fag, is that right?"

 _I'm not gay, I'm bi_ , Jake thinks mullishly, but even he knows that it's not the time. "Excuse me," he tries, but his voice is barely loud enough to be heard at this point. He feels his phone buzz again. He wants to answer her. 

One of them clips his chin, not that hard and not well aimed, but Jake's still a little drunk and he bites his tongue hard. Blood dribbles into his mouth and he gags on the metallic tastes, hoping they're satisfied with one hit - but he's never been that lucky. 

Jake goes down embarrassingly fast, and the cold that seeps through his clothes is almost the most shocking part of the whole encounter. He makes a guttural sound when his head smacks the pavement; there's a pendulum-swing of nausea swooping through him. There's a spike of dull pain that's overshadowed by most everything that comes next. 

Jake Peralta dies - he thinks he's dying - he feels like he is - at 2.15am on the wet street less than five minutes from his apartment. Jake Peralta dies completely and utterly alone. 

-

"It's my fault."

"Of course it's not," Amy replies automatically. Her coffee has been cold for a very long time. Her eyes don't leave the observation window. "You couldn't have seen this coming." 

She can feel the fury radiating off of Rosa, the helpless anger that Amy is all but burned out of. "I should have walked him home." Rosa snarls; her eyes is wild and glazed. "He was still drunk." 

"It wouldn't have mattered." Amy's vision blurs; she blinks to focus her eyes. "They probably picked him out at the door. It wouldn't have...nothing would have changed."

The two women stand in silence. The window muffles the dogged beeping of Jake's heart moniter, the wheeze and hiss of his oxygen machine. His hands lie palm up like he's accepting a blessing; he is destroyed to biblical proportions, and Amy is sick with devotion.

-

Jake is beneath the sea. He's rolling with the currents, deep visceral movements that lull him further under. He isn't afraid, but he doesn't want to be here anymore.

He can hear a beeping through the water, like some kind of awesome techno whale, but it's more annoying that comforting. Enough, something in him thinks uncomfortably; but he stays under and still can't feel, can't think, can't swim.

-

Amy hasn't slept for seventy-two hours. She knows she must look like shit. Holt tells her to go home and sleep, that the 99 is taking shifts in the waiting room until Jake wakes up, but she can't leave him. How can she ever leave him again?

Amy spends most of her time at the observation window; the intensive care unit isn't keen on her being in his room 24/7, even if she is a cop and pulls that card every chance she gets. She wants to crawl into the bed with Jake and stay there until he heals, but she stays on the other side of the glass.

He looks very young and very small, like the goofy young detective he'd been when she joined the precinct. The crisp sheet pulled up to his ribs is lumpy with tubes and wires snaking over him, into him. Amy wants to rip them out and steal him away from the plain, sterile room, but she doesn't. She won't. She needs him to get better, or she doesn't know what she'll do.

Bruises. He's so bruised. They broke his arm. Amy closes her eyes and leans her forehead against the cool glass. He'll wake up soon, he knows. He will. It's alright.

-

When Jake's mom arrives, she's the whirlwind of energy Amy has been needing. She shows up with all the frantic force of a protective mother, gets the hospital rabbi even though Jake hasn't practised in years, brings hundreds of packets of sugar in her handbag to improve the hospital coffee. She's the picture of composure - while everyone can see her. 

But Amy just about to go into Jake's room when she sees his mother is already sitting by his bedside. She freezes in the doorway as Mrs Peralta strokes her son's cheek; there are tears in her eyes.

"Wake up, honey." she murmurs, caught in a private moment that Amy would never intrude in. "Time to wake up, Jacob."

Jake's chest rises and falls, and Amy watches his mom close her eyes in silent pain. Roger Peralta is loudly, noticeably absent through it all.

-

"Kevin. It's me, your husband Raymond Holt."

Amy is roused from her doze by Holt's quiet, controlled voice. She keeps her eyes shut, still drifting; it's only the two of them in the waiting room, the fishtank's glow undulating across her closed eyes.

She can't help but half-listen to Holt's phonecall. "I wanted to call and hear your voice." His voice is uncharacteristically soft. "Peralta's attack has proved...more upsetting than I anticipated."

There's silence as Kevin replies, and Amy almost goes back to sleep until Holt's voice cuts through her drowsiness again. "Yes, we were lucky it was not fatal." He sounds oddly choked up. '"It reminds me unpleasantly of the many homophobic attacks of the eighties." Another pause. "I'm worried that...they may become as commonplace as they were."

The fishtank is a tiny lightbulbed ocean. Amy wants to be asleep so badly.

"I'm afraid, Kevin."

-

Jake starts to struggle to the surface after what feels like years. It's cold and hard and his limbs are so heavy, but when he breaks out of the water he gasps real air, cold air, for what feels like the first time in years.

He knows his eyes are open, but it's a white blur, and when he blinks it's like a solar eclipse. There is something hard going down his throat and he tries to swallow automatically and chokes.

He swallows again and sucks in through his nose. The room starts to take shape around him; the whale is back, but the whale seems to be some sort of machine. He can't turn his head, but his eyes roll from side to side - there isn't much to see other than a white ceiling.

Jake must make some sort of noise, some dry whimper, because a hand touches his arm out of nowhere and he would jump out of his skin if he could move. An unfamiliar face swims into view and he struggles to focus on it, nausea curling up between his ribs.

"Jacob? It's Nurse Jenny. I'm going to take out the tube, alright?"

 _What tube?_ Jake wonders and then suddenly the thing starts to pull up his throat and out through his mouth, scraping along the way, making him splutter and cough. It's gone within five seconds, but it leaves behind a burn.

"Wha," Jake tries to ask, but his tongue is gluey and won't working. The nurse puts an oxygen mask over his face and Jake breathes in gratefully, but it begins to feel too much like a muzzle. _The whale!_ , he thinks blearily, shaking his head a little to try and dislodge it, and -

Then he sees her.

-

Amy bursts into the room before any nurse can stop her, Jake's name dying in her throat; his tired eyes lock onto her, bloodshot and blue-rimmed, and she stops dead. She suddenly has no idea what to say to him. 

The nurse leaning over him takes a step back, smiling encouragingly. "He can probably handle a light hug, love," she says, and Amy's ice cracks and she runs straight to him, flinging herself onto the bed. She feels his unbroken arm loop around her shoulders, shaky fingers tangling in her hair, and he ducks his nose into her neck.

"Ames," he murmurs, oddly slow, "Amessss."

"I'm here." Amy tries to avoid the deep black bruising she knows hides underneath his hospital gown, and instead rests her hands on his shoulder. "How are you feeling?"

"Sore." Jake grimaces and she kisses him quickly, needing to take the pain away so badly that it hurt. "Tired. What happened?"

Amy feels her eyes go wide. Shit. "Do you remember going t with Rosa?" she asks carefully; Jake's eyes are syrupy and soft and confused.

He nods with some difficultly. "Kind of." His voice is so heavy. "I don't..."

Then recognition sparks sluggishly in his eyes, and now it's Amy who winces. "Oh, no," Jake moans, "oh, no they...there were..near the apartment..."

"Yeah, Jake." Amy knows she can't fix it. "Yeah, Jake, but you're safe, okay?"

"Rosa -"

"She's alright. So are you, babe."

Jake settles back into the pillows. "The whale," he slurs. His eyelids flutter. "Electro-whale."

"Go back to sleep," Amy whispers, stifling a laugh. "No whales here."

Jake nods at that and flops down, breathing deeply and heavily, and almost immediately is out like a light. Amy leans back and sighs. She can't fix it right now, or in the near future. She wants to but she can't, but she will eventually.

He'll wake up again soon, and they'll go from there.


End file.
